Magnus wins

coveted

IPMA Achievement Awards 2013

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Magnus Consulting Group Pvt. Ltd. is Nepal's first Social Enterprise established in 2005 to work with rural small farmers - through their cooperatives and Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) - to help them improve their socio-economic status. The ground breaking partnership model, Private Community Partnership (PCP), has been highly effective in enterprise's strategies to work with the underserved farmers.

In the PCP, first, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is integrated into small farmer cooperatives and MFIs. The enterprise's locally developed software solutions is integrated with the coop's and MFI's strategies and then tailored-made training program is executed for behavior change intervention (BCI) for rapid adoption of ICT. The cooperatives and MFIs are sensitized of investment on the ICT infrastructure and its return period (CBA was the result of pilots in 2006 in three cooperatives which provided leeway to replicate in few more before scaling up). The training coupled with BCI strategies, then help them embrace ICT at rapid pace. PCP, which is a partnership for a long haul, concretizes the trust between the enterprise and the coops and MFIs.

Today, the enterprise has successfully integrated ICT in 250 Small Farmer Agriculture Cooperatives and MFIs in 45 districts. This is unprecedented in the backdrop of numerous ICT diffusion attempts by other actors in all sectors. In an average, 3.5 staffs of each of these rural financial institutions, have developed capacity to operate on ICT and trust their own newly acquired skills-set: and the number is growing by 10% every year.

The internet connectivity, now has been successfully established in 100 partners. In addition to software solution itself, the demand of the connectivity has risen from the coops and MFIs themselves, because of the acquired knowledge on efficiency, transparency and easy-to-work-environment that ICT has introduced. With the connectivity, not only enterprise addresses problems and bugs relating to the software, it also sends software updates, messages (e-mail possible now) and other information relating to good governance. In other words, these isolated communities are now connected with the world and opens up many social business opportunities for the enterprise as well as other strategic partners.

With ten year's experiences in rural areas with farming communities in designing, developing, implementing and monitoring ICT interventions and BCI strategies and finance software development has driven the enterprise to its maturity level for highly specialized and effective services to our clients. During the first five years, to sustain the strategies, the enterprise embarked on executing and managing many ICT related projects that span from ICT consulting to software development to out-sourcing. This is the other service portfolio of the enterprise.